Author Archives: dsmarley

Smuin Ballet and Shocktoberfest 2007

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Friday night Dave and I saw Smuin Ballet at the Palace of Fine Arts. I thought it was a terrific program. Amy Seiwert’s Objects of Curiosity, a world premiere, is an abstract dance; it seemed to me to be nothing revolutionary but attractive and interesting. Michael Smuin’s Duettino is a flashy trifle that lets a pair of good dancers show off a lot. Smuin’s Stabat Mater, choreographed in response to 9/11, is very powerful and beautiful, though the mixing of images suggestive of the Stabat Mater and of 9/11 is startling and I’m not sure what the point of the juxtaposition is. The last piece on the program, Reinin’ in the Hurricane, is delightful, a series of short turns set to popular country-western songs, beginning and ending with “Don’t Fence Me In”.

I thought two Asian male dancers, Koichi Kubo in Duettino and Kevin Yee-Chan in Reinin’ in the Hurricane, were standouts, both of them pulling off a lot of flashy moves with a lot of charm. All in all a very enjoyable evening.

Then last night Dave and Terry and I went to the Hypnodrome to see Thrillpeddlers’ Shocktoberfest!! 2007: Maker of Monsters. Thrillpeddlers specializes in recreating Grand Guignol, and a few years ago they acquired their own tiny theater, the Hypnodrome. Dave and I have seen most of the Shocktoberfests since the first one at the Exit Theater, and we both thought this was the best one ever. They’ve done individual plays that have worked as well for me — I especially remember The Crime in the Madhouse, which Dave and I both found particularly disturbing — but this is the first show they’ve done where I felt like they were at their best all the way through from beginning to end. The actors played more consistently with conviction, and even those who have been Thrillpeddlers regulars for a while seemed to have improved a level or two in believability. The stage effects were more consistently effective and something downright beautiful, and the overall shape of the program was very satisfying.

The Grand Guignol recipe was a program of very short plays, a mix of sex farces and lurid Nightmare-on-Elm-Street style melodramas with lots of sadism, terror, stage blood, and other gruesome effects. The first play on the bill was The Maker of Monsters, which we’re pretty sure they did once before in a Shocktoberfest back in the Exit, but it was much much stronger this time around. This was followed by a series of three very short skits based on three very unusual — yet very popular in terms of the number of Google searches made per day — sexual fetishes.

After an intermission, The Colossus is a creepy, brooding play about a sculptor who loses his beloved four-year-old daughter in a fire, and The Bloody Con is a silly farce about four convicts forced to take part in a gruesome medical experiment, and is as much as anything an excuse for a lot of stage blood and other effects. But it ends the show on a note of silliness and fun.

I Market-Tested the Following Opinion Before Committing to It

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Just watched the Chris Matthews interview on The Daily Show plugging a new book he’s written about how to live your whole life as though you were running a political campaign. (I’m not kidding; that’s what the book is about. I forget the exact title but it’s something like Live Your Life Like a Campaign.)

I’ve never seen Hardball (I don’t want television except for downloading The Daily Show and The Colbert Report from the iTunes Store) so this is the first time I’ve ever seen Mr. Matthews, and I gotta say the guy comes across as a bit of a crybaby.

Granted, Mr. Stewart didn’t start out gushing with praise for the book; he said that it seemed to him like a recipe for sadness, to make all your decisions in life based on pretending to be what people want you to be. Mr. Matthews made the briefest of attempts at a defense of the premise of his book — it didn’t amount to much more than “Is not!” — and then started complaining about how this was the worst book interview he’d ever had. Mr. Stewart made some specific criticisms and Mr. Matthews responded to them only vaguely. It seemed as though he had not put much thought or much conviction into the book he’d written. Really, he came off like a shallow, superficial person who had written a book on a shallow, superficial premise and who was caught off guard when he met up with someone who didn’t want to praise him for it.

That’s so like the so-called “conservative” movement today. Mr. or Ms. Pundit offers a few simple, glib rules for running your life, and then when someone says, Wait, but it doesn’t actually work that way, the response isn’t to admit that sometimes life is complicated and to try to figure out something to do about it; no, the response is to get angry at someone for having a complicated reality that messes up the neat little idealistic theory.

Favorite moment: Mr. Matthews at one point tells Mr. Stewart that the ideas in his book are what you have to do if you want to be successful; Mr. Stewart responds, “But — I am successful.”

A Divine Penicillin

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An international anti-gay movement called the Watchmen on the Walls has been increasingly active in the Sacramento Valley and other parts of the Northwest, particularly among Slavic immigrants. According to a story at AlterNet:

Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told the Seattle Times in January that God has “made an injection” of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. “In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin,” Kusakin said.

In Latvia, the movement is openly violent toward gays and lesbians; it is increasingly becoming so in the United States as well. Members have assaulted gays and lesbians at gay pride events in the Sacramento area. A lesbian photographer was dragged through a Portland church by her hair by one of the movement’s chief spokesmen.

Then on July 1, a group of Russian-speaking picnickers at Lake Natoma noticed that one member of a group two picnic tables away was an effeminate man without a female date, though the others at the table were three married couples.

According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them “7-Eleven workers” and “Sodomites.” The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a “good church” like theirs. According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.

The pregnant woman said she didn’t want to fight them.

“We don’t want to fight you either,” one of them replied in English. “We just want your faggot friend.”

One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.

Scott Lively, the above-mentioned lesbian-dragging spokesman, is the co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party.

Published in 1995, the book is a breathtaking work of Holocaust revisionism. It asserts that Hitler was gay — a claim no serious historian supports — and that Hitler and other evil gay fascists were central in forming the Nazi Party, operating the Third Reich and orchestrating the Holocaust. (Lively’s most recent book, The Poisoned Stream, similarly details “a dark and powerful homosexual presence” through “the Spanish Inquisition, the French ‘Reign of Terror,’ the era of South African apartheid, and the two centuries of American Slavery.”)

The Watchmen on the Wall seem like one seriously obsessed bunch.

The Watchmen portray the battle against gay rights as nothing less than a biblical clash of civilizations. “The homosexual sexual ethic” and “family-based society” are at war, Lively proclaimed in his letter to the Washington Times. “One must prevail at the expense of the other.”

That sort of militant rhetoric is standard among Watchmen followers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Speaking to his American counterparts in a Watchmen video, a Latvian anti-gay activist intones: “Your generation beat the Nazis, and our country beat the Communists. Together we will defeat the homosexuals!”

Poz/Neg Gathering, Way Back in May

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I went to a terrific Billy Club gathering way way back over Memorial Day weekend, one of the best I’ve been to, and I have been sitting on a two-thirds written blog entry about it for months. I am a bad, bad blogger. About time to finish it up.

This gathering was more focused than most of the Billy Club gatherings are. Gatherings are often organized loosely around a theme, but usually the whole schedule is not tightly structured around it. This one, though, was on the general theme of being HIV positive or negative — both personally and in terms of the divide in the gay community. This is the second year we’ve had such a gathering, and we get some grant money from two rural counties to help pay the costs for HIV-positive men from those counties who attend, so since there’s financial support for it, it’s likely to be the usual theme of the Memorial Day gathering as long as they keep helping to pay for it.

Not too surprisingly, then, some of the workshops were a bit didactic. But surprisingly many were not, and in fact I think overall it may have been the least mind-oriented and most body-oriented gathering in a long while, with more workshops in physical movement and physical play and the like than I think I’ve ever seen at one gathering.

All in all, I had a great time and thought it was terrific. Not directly because of the theme — in the late 1980s I fell in love with a man who was already dying of AIDS, and we became very close. It was a very hard relationship to describe in a few words: We were too close to be Just Good Friends and yet not really lovers or partners — we called ourselves “brothers” sometimes. He ended up living with me for six months near the end of his life. The two years that I knew him changed me profoundly. So I’ve already done a lot of my thinking and growing about these issues long ago, and any workshop whose goal is to get me to overcome my fear and/or prejudice against HIV-positive men is about 20 years too late. Been there, stopped doing that.

But even so, I think the somewhat serious theme had the indirect effect of making it a better gathering, or at least more to my taste. And because this was an added gathering to our usual schedule, we couldn’t have it in our usual location, which was already booked for that weekend, and so we held it at a retreat center in Willits.

Inevitably, there were some complaints about the food not being as good as we usually get (which to be honest it wasn’t — one of our members, a professional chef and caterer, usually cooks for us, and he’s amazing, but for this gathering the retreat center’s own staff did the cooking), and there were complaints as well about the place being right off a moderately busy road — not very secluded at all. All true. And a lot of our regulars did not show up, perhaps turned off by the theme or by the location.

On the other hand, a lot of members who don’t often come to gatherings were there, especially many from Mendocino and Santa Cruz counties, many of whom were there with their fees subsidize by some of the county funding. And it seemed to me that the unfamiliar location and the fact that regular gathering-goers were in the minority were precisely the reasons for the sense of vitality and alertness I felt in the air, a sharpness and livelier that I don’t often feel at Billy Club gatherings, which usually have a lazier feel to them. Each of us was making it up as we went along, nobody was on autopilot doing the same thing they always do with the same people they always do it with in the same way they have been doing it for ten or fifteen years, and there was much less of a social divide between newer and older members than there usually is. Also, a much more diverse mix of ages and skin colors and I am guessing socioeconomic class than I generally see at gatherings. All good. Very good.

Sometimes I think I wish that we could serve really basic dull food at all the Billy Club gatherings for a year, and drain the swimming pool and hot tub for a year while we’re at it, just to alienate all those regulars who come primarily for the creature comforts. We’d be left with the people who really care about our community and about spiritual self-exploration and so on.

Yeah, like that would go over swimmingly. Oh well. I can daydream …

The workshops at Poz/Neg, as I said, were very physical. A morning workshop on “contemplative dance” started with a half hour of meditation, followed by a half hour of slow physical warmup and a half hour of free-style dancing. I was a little embarrassed at the idea going into it — I like dancing but I tend to go for the structured sort, ballroom and folk dancing and that kind of thing — and I was surprised at how easily I got into it, and how solidly centered and grounded I felt at the end.

I got in several heart-to-heart talks over the weekend with people I either had never met before or only met once before at last year’s Poz/Neg. I think I like the heart-to-heart talks best of anything at the gatherings. I even spent a couple of hours one evening having a wonderful talk while lying back with an arm around a hunky guy who turned out to be a sex worker by profession. Yow. Sometimes I just have to stop and be amazed at how far I’ve come from my Orange County upbringing.

The Soldier Who Knew Too Much?

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This story in Massachusetts’s Patriot Ledger is disturbing: A National Guardswoman, Clara Durkin, who worked with financial accounting in Afghanistan came home to Quincy, Massachusetts, last month on leave. According to her sister,

‘‘She was in the finance unit and she said, ‘I discovered some things I don’t like and I made some enemies because of it.’ Then she said, in her light-hearted way, ‘If anything happens to me, you guys make sure it gets investigated,’’’ [her sister] said. ‘‘But at the time we thought it was said more as a joke.’’”

Two weeks later, back in Afghanistan, she was found dead on her own military base, shot once in the head. An investigation is in progress.

Bearly Made It

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Dave sent me the link to this pretty darned amazing story about a bear who was crossing the Rainbow Bridge near Donner Summit, got spooked by some oncoming cars, and jumped over the edge. Somehow instead of plunging to its death, it managed to clutch on to a concrete beam underneath the bridge, dangled for a while by its front paws, pulled itself up somehow, and scrambled onto the beam.

Where it was royally stuck, with nowhere to go but down. And down was an 80-foot drop into a ravine strewn with boulders. Needless to say, it stayed put where it was, and eventually fell asleep on its narrow perch.

The next day a group of volunteers led by an animal control officer executed a seriously cool rescue mission. Whew.

You’ve got to check out the photos. It looks absolutely inevitable that that bear is a goner, and yet it all ends happily. Just amazing.

Are We There Yet?

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Thanks to a mention on Trip Payne’s website, I have been spending too much time this past week on Mark Halpin’s lovely set of puzzles called Are We There Yet? This is a set of 12 puzzles loosely based on The Odyssey — a diagramless crossword puzzle on a theme related to the encounter with the Cyclopes, a logic puzzle based on the bag of winds given by Aeolus, and so on. Each puzzle also has something tricky going on with it, and when the solution is properly interpreted it will give a phrase that you can enter at the website; if you’re right, you get back a piece of a map or other item. At least, I think that’s what’s going on with all 12 puzzles, but I have only solved seven of them all the way to the point of entering the right phrase, so whether there is something even trickier going on with other five, I don’t yet know.

I especially enjoyed the puzzle connected with the plunder of Ismaros, a sort of twisted word search puzzle that took me several hours and much, much Googling to solve. It’s impossible to talk about this sort of thing much because you don’t want to give any unwanted hints to anyone who might want to try it, so I’ll just say that I encountered a lot of surprises and discoveries along the way to the answer. I just today finished the diagramless crossword for “The Island of the Cyclopes”, and it’s got a delightful surprise at the end — the several ways in which the puzzle ties into the theme are clever and a lot of fun to discover.

My one caveat is that these are pretty tough (though fair) puzzles and I think an inexperienced solver would have a lot of trouble just knowing where to start. None of them comes with clear, full, and specific instructions; in most cases a lot of the help in figuring out what to do comes just from recognizing that the puzzle looks a lot like a particular puzzle type you’ve seen in magazines. So when each puzzle turns out to have an unexpected twist in it somewhere, that’s just the right level of challenge for someone like me. But for someone who maybe hasn’t seen a Fences puzzle before or a Flower Garden puzzle or an Anaquote or a diagramless crossword and so on, and doesn’t know how to solve them even without the twists, I think maybe that person is going to get lost quickly. It might be a nice thing if Mr. Halpin were to write up a sheet of instructions for the basic puzzle types that his are based on; the more experienced puzzlers like me don’t have to look at it.

I’ve “solved” all 12 puzzles now, but as I said, I still haven’t figured out what to do with five of them. For each of the other seven, I’ve entered a phrase and received a piece of a map or other item, but the seven pieces I have received don’t seem to do me any good yet, so I’m figuring I’m not going to be able to go anywhere with that till I get all 12 pieces.

And in the meanwhile, the final steps of these five puzzles still elude me:

AIOLIA — I’ve solved the logic puzzle about the winds of Aeolus, but I don’t see any way to derive a phrase from the answer.

THE ISLAND OF LOTOPHAGI — I’ve solved the clues and filled in the grid, and I have a number of letters that sure look as though they ought to be significant, the sort of thing where if this were a puzzle in Games magazine or the like, the letters would have spelled out a message. However, in this case they don’t spell anything at all, and I haven’t been able to anagram them into anything relevant either.

OGYGIA — I’ve completed the puzzle, which is a mildly unorthodox Cross Sums, but I don’t see how to derive a phrase from the answer, which of course is all numbers.

THE SIRENS — I’ve found the answer to the Anaquote-like three-letter pieces at the bottom of the page, and I see a reason (or at least a correspondence with something connected to the rest of the puzzle) for the eight large letters on the ring of islands shown in the middle of the page. Doesn’t give me a phrase.

THRINACIA — I’ve solved the puzzles on the four smaller maps, and I see how the four solutions can be related to the larger map. But there seem to be two equally valid ways to apply this, and I don’t see that either of them gets me a phrase.

More Notes About Pages

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I have come across two things that I can do in InDesign but can’t find a way to do in Pages. First, I can’t find a way to make objects snap to grid lines — not crucial, but you can do it in InDesign and it’s a help. Second, I can’t find a way to vertically justify the text in a column.

Basically, the lack of these two functions means that aligning the bottoms of side-by-side columns of text takes a lot of fussy tweaking instead of a few quick actions.

Pages

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I bought the new iWork ’08 suite last week, lured by the new spreadsheet program and the promise of enhanced Word-compatibility which might make it possible to do work from the office on my laptop without having to actually buy Microsoft Office for the Mac.

The compatibility seems okay but I forgot to investigate whether Pages works well with Equation Editor or MathType, which are essential for my work as a technical editor. It doesn’t, so I won’t be using it for office work after all.

Right now I’m trying out Pages for layout, which I usually do in InDesign. I’m laying out the announcement for the New Year’s Billy gathering. It’s pretty easy to use, and so far I haven’t encountered anything I want to do but can’t. It’s obvious at a glance that Pages has fewer capabilities than InDesign, but so far it looks like the ones that are missing are things I don’t use.

Many of the functions are easier and more intuitive to use than in InDesign. Dropping graphics onto a page and adjusting how text wraps or doesn’t wrap around them seems easier. Adjusting how an image in the text is sized and cropped is a bit easier and faster in Pages than in InDesign, and that’s something that comes up a lot because, unless you’re dealing with an image of a painting or an art photograph that should be shown complete or not at all, you want to be able to tweak the image to fill the space available — shaving a little off an edge of a snapshot, for example.

A feature called “Instant Alpha” allowed me to very quickly remove the white background from some graphics (so that the text would flow around the object rather than around the white rectangle containing the object); that’s possible in InDesign, too, but it takes more time; in Pages, it was just a matter of two mouse clicks. Nice.

This announcement is taking me about as long to lay out in Pages as it would in InDesign, but a lot of that time has been spent looking things up in the help file and just generally exploring where everything is. I think for fairly straightforward layout jobs, once I get to know the program, Pages will be faster.

I haven’t had time to look at Keynote and Numbers yet.

Interview With John Shelby Spong

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While reading some blogs about Bishop Spong’s open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury (or “ABC” in Episcopalese) Rowan Williams, I came across a terrific interview with Spong at the blog Faith and Theology. The interviewer is not all that sympathetic to Spong.

Some of my favorite bits:

On what he thinks of Pope Benedict’s most recent book: “I don’t think he and I live in the same century.”

On the recent prominence of outspoken atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens:

As I see it, there are three responses to our contemporary crisis of faith. The first is the reaction of those extreme fundamentalists who close their minds and remain so fearful that they will ban or try to silence anybody that disagrees with them. The second is the emergence of what I call the “Church Alumni Association,” which is by far the fastest growing Christian movement – certainly much faster than right-wing fundamentalism in America, and I would bet in Australia too. These are people that can’t see an alternative to fundamentalism, and so they say that they just don’t want to be part of that whole ‘religious thing’. And the third response is this new wave of militant atheists who see religion as a positive evil. Now this is an enormous ferment, and I think it’s really an alive and fruitful and exciting time to be someone who is publicly addressing God and Christ and theological issues.

And:

I see all these battles that we’re now caught up in, both inside and outside the church, as very exciting, even invigorating.

On the controversy about Gene Robinson:

I know that Gene Robinson is not the only gay bishop in the Episcopal Church right now. I won’t name the others, but I will say that among these gay bishops are some of the most homophobic voices that are raised within that church. I sit back and look at these people with bewilderment. I could name the gay bishops in the Anglican communion in England without any trouble. I know them! So it’s not that we have this new thing called a gay bishop. The only thing that’s new here is that we have an honest gay bishop. …

Like I said, I grew up in the South, and I know that when there’s a moral principle involved — like slavery — you don’t compromise on that. Slavery is either right or it’s wrong. And you don’t keep unity in the church by keeping the slave owners happy. … In my opinion, the issue of homosexuality is just as strong and just as morally serious.

On Archbishop Williams:

In my opinion, he collapsed the day after he was appointed. He wrote a letter to all the Primates saying that as the Archbishop of Canterbury he would not act on his personal convictions but only on the Lambeth resolutions, which in effect gave away his leadership ability. The previous Archbishop, who was extremely homophobic, would never have done such a thing. He would never have said that he’s not going to act on his principles, because he believed that his principles were directly from God and it was therefore up to him to impose them on others. Liberals are always weak. Liberals can see two sides of an issue, and therefore are reluctant ever to impose a position on anybody. But if Rowan would just say: “This is my personal witness. I will try to preside over this institution with all of its foibles, but I need the world to know that discrimination against gay and lesbian people is wrong, and I think the church is wrong to be compromised on this issue ….”

On the Christian myth:

Before Darwin we told the story of the Christian faith in terms of human beings that were created perfect in God’s image, but who disobeyed God and fell into sin, thus corrupting the whole created order. Human beings couldn’t save themselves. The law tried and the prophets tried, and finally God enters the world in God’s good time in the form of a saviour-rescuer. And that’s the story about Jesus, how he pays the price for sin on the cross, and so restores the fallen creature to what God intended them to be in the first place. That essentially is the theology of the incarnation and atonement that we’ve talked about for years.

But it doesn’t work, and it’s not true. We never were created perfect in God’s image. We were created as single-cell units of life and we evolved over four-and-a-half to five billion years into various stages until at least we achieved self-consciousness. We are survival-oriented people because we wouldn’t have made it through the evolutionary process if we hadn’t been survival-oriented. And so we are radically self-centred, survival-orientated creatures, and we had to be to win the battle of evolution. But once we’ve won the battle, then there’s no more enemy except ourselves and so we turn our survival-instincts against one another — in genocide, for example. What got us to this position of dominance in the world is not sufficient to get us to whatever the next stage is. What Darwin suggests is that none of us need to be rescued from a fall that never happened, or restored to a status that we never possessed. That whole way of telling the Christian story simply doesn’t work.

So instead of seeing Jesus as the divine saviour-rescuer who pays the price of sin, I think we’ve got to turn our whole Christology toward seeing Jesus as the kind of humanity that enables us to get over being the kind of survival-oriented creatures that we are and begin to give our lives away. I think that is dramatically powerful, and something to which people would be willing to give themselves if they understood it.

I have to say, though, that I don’t think single-cell units of life are necessarily any less “created in God’s image” than we humans are — if there’s any truth in that concept at all (and I think there is), the one thing it really cannot mean is that we look physically like God.